I Terroni in Città: revisiting southern migrants militancy in Turin's hot autumn

This article proposes a revision of the predominant view of southern Italians during the ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969 in Turin, one of the most remarkable moments of working-class mobilisation in modern European history. The representation of southern Italians as ‘primitive rebels’ and ‘spontaneous’ radicals has its roots in an earlier notion of southerners as social deviants and has obscured a much more complex historical reality. This image, endorsed by historians and popularised in fictional accounts, contradicts contemporary evidence which points to southerners’ singular mix of radicalism and conservatism, resistance and integration